–Karl Marx
Beginning in the seventeenth century, modern science constructed a mechanistic paradigm which views animals as automata or machines. From Descartes to sociobiology and behaviorism in the present, the modern tradition cast animals in the role of brutes or machines who can neither feel nor think. Students trained in this paradigm quickly learned to avoid reference to the subjective life of animals unless they desire ridicule. Under the spell of behaviorism, scientists re-describe the love a chimpanzee might experience as “attachment formation,” the anger of an elephant as “aggression exhibition,” and the aptitude of a bird as a “conditioned reflex.” Journals typically refuse to publish papers that allude to animal thoughts or emotions.
Having misled us for so long about animals, science is initiating a revolution in our understanding. Through evolutionary theory, genetics, neurophysiology, and experimental procedures, many scientists are providing strong evidence that animals feel and think in ways akin to us. As we saw above, the changes began with Charles Darwin. His theory of natural selection informed us that human beings are in fact animals and, as such, they evolve according to the same evolutionary dynamics as nonhuman animals. In The Origin of Species and later works such as The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin established the animal roots of humanity, and described close psychological and behavioral relations between humans and other animal species. He argued that humans are different from animals “in degree, not kind.” Darwin led the way in showing the evolutionary continuum throughout the animal world, such that there is no dividing point separating unintelligent and intelligent life, but rather a development of consciousness, intelligence, subjectivity, choice, and freedom stretching from elementary organisms to complex thinking animals. Scientists embraced his theory of evolution while ignoring his ethological work, for this they found repugnant to their speciesist prejudices and subversive to business-as-usual in the vivisection research and pharmaceutical industries where the pursuit of profit cannot be troubled by moral conscience and ethical truths.
Clearly, results can be interpreted in different ways, and staunch defenders of behaviorism remain unconvinced. In 1984, C. Lloyd Morgan formulated the “law of parsimony,” a variation on Ockham’s razor, which states that one should not appeal to a “higher” function (intelligence) of organisms when a “lower” function (instinct) will adequately explain a behavior. Behaviorists used his principle in an aggressively reductionist manner, subsuming all behaviors to crude instincts and learning mechanisms. But Morgan himself admitted animal intelligence exists, and his principle establishes just the opposite. When confronted by the overwhelming evidence of animal intelligence, the lower functions do not explain the behaviors; rather, they make sense only through reference to higher level principles. In other words, the simplest explanation, the one not saddled with ad hoc qualifications, is an appeal to the flexible and thinking qualities of animal minds.
While this account of the emotional and intellectual richness of animals may touch the layperson, it offends the hard-nose scientist. From a mechanistic scientific perspective, it is nonsense to speak of animal emotions and minds, since they can’t be observed or measured. It is “anthropomorphic” to ascribe human-like characteristics to animals. It is “unscientific” to name them as if they were people. And such stories at best are merely anecdotal. Today, this situation is changing decisively as science undertakes an exciting paradigm shift that embraces the study of animal emotions and minds. Until the last few decades, human beings have languished in the Paleolithic Era of their knowledge about animals. As evident in a spate of recent books and the new discipline of “cognitive ethology” that studies animal intelligence, science finally is beginning to fathom the depth of animal complexity. It revolutionizes our shallow understanding of nonhuman animals, while altering our vain image of ourselves.
From Donald Griffin’s pioneering work in the 1980s to the recent studies of Roger Fouts, Frans de Wall, Marc Bekoff, Steven Wise, and others, ethology has demonstrated that animals have far more complex thoughts, feelings, and social lives than most humans dared to imagine.[19] Rooted in a dualistic and ahistorical perspective, modern science failed to grasp the developmental continuum of intelligence, social life, and subjectivity within massive spans of evolutionary change and development. Mechanistic science submerges all pre-human evolution into a vast vat of unarticulated consciousness, viewing animals as automatons or machines who merely react to the world instinctually and passively play out their biological programming. The belief that animals are primitive only betrays the archaic limitations of the human mind and its inability to grasp the otherness of animal life and behavior.
This paradigm is now utterly bereft and bankrupt, and many quarters of science and philosophy have abandoned Cartesian mechanism, behaviorism, and speciesist dualism. In the shift to a post-Cartesian science, there are now scores of books, spates of documentaries, and a proliferation of papers that document the breadth and depth of animal complexity and intelligence, chronicling one staggering discovery after another. The pace of discovery is such that, literally, our views of nonhuman animals are changing by the day. We are recognizing distortions and fallacies on each side of the ontological chasm Western society dug between human and nonhuman animals, and ethology has broken down the thick walls of separation. Just as many humans are not rational in many ways, so animals are rational in many ways. Humans overestimate their own rationality as they underestimate the rationality of animals. Similarly, whereas humans have reduced animals to biology and thus denied them culture, so humans, focusing only on the voluntarist facets of their culture, have failed to grasp the biological dimensions of human culture.[20]
Cognitive ethology corroborates the conclusion of common sense and unbiased observation, namely, that animals have rich and complex emotion, intellectual, and social lives ¯ as it far exceeds the data of everyday life to advance truly startling conclusions. Only the most retrograde Cartesian still denies or is skeptical of the fact that animals are sentient, and we know, moreover, that have every feeling we have, including fear, stress, loneliness, sorrow, jealousy, embarrassment, pride, empathy, love, happiness, and joy. In their vivid vignettes, Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy describe how Michael the gorilla loved opera singer Luciano Pavarotti; how Hoku the dolphin grieved over the death of his marine park companion, Kiko; and how Flint the chimp even died of grief upon the death of his mother, Flo.[21] It is a well-known fact that elephants mourn their dead, enact burial rituals, and seemingly show an awareness of the significance and permanence of death. Animals know joy as well as sorrow, and can be playful as well as serious. They also possess an aesthetic sense, and sense of humor, as evident in the behavior of birds who delight in dancing and chimpanzees who love to bang drums, throw balls, and paint.[22]
Complex forms of intelligence run broad and deep throughout the world of animals. Birds, for instance, have complex memories and abilities to map vast spaces (the speciesist slander “bird brain” could not be more spurious) and some bird species use tools and exhibit problem-solving skills as well. Many animals have abilities to count simple amounts and to recognize patterns and visual relationships and analogies – often better than children and even college undergraduates! There is strong evidence that “higher” mammals such as whales, dolphins, gorillas, and chimpanzees have significant rational and linguistic abilities. Koko the gorilla has a sign vocabulary of 500 words and does internet chats. Alex the African Grey parrot could name over 100 different objects, 7 colors, and 5 shapes; moreover, he can count objects up to 6 and speak in meaningful sentences.[23] Chimpanzees have a repertoire of at least thirty sounds that have distinct meanings and express emotions. Given the tools of American Sign Language and lexigram symbols, great apes are communicating to human beings and one another their needs, desires, and thoughts. Various tests with mirrors and hidden objects suggest that chimpanzees and bonobos might have self-consciousness and awareness of other minds. Dolphins communicate their individuality to each other through signature whistles and whales have a repertoire of over six hundred distinct social sounds. Thousands of experiments in the field and laboratory have demonstrated that animals such as prairie dogs, squirrels, and even chickens convey not only emotion but also information in their complexly differentiated alarm cries for the presence of predators.
Acknowledging only one model of intelligence and communication ¯ that of Homo sapiens ¯ scientists have argued, since animals don’t speak or reason like we do, they don’t have minds at all. In expecting animals to satisfy human criteria of language and intelligence, scientists have, after all, succumbed to the dreaded sin of anthropomorphism. But anthropomorphism need not be a scientific sin. Clearly, we don’t want to project onto animals characteristics they don’t have. But if there are core commonalities between nonhuman and human animals, what Griffin calls “critical anthropomorphism”, is our best access to understanding animals, and “objective detachment” will block insight every time.
It is not that many animal species cannot think, symbolize, and communicate in sophisticated ways, but that we could not figure out how to open their minds to us and how to interpret their sounds and behaviors. It is crucial to emphasize that intelligence operates in forms other than human induction and deduction, and that meaning can be transmitted through gestures, expressions, sounds, and movements, and is not restricted to the conventions of human syntax, although monkeys understand basic rules of grammar.[24]
Even more devastating to human claims to singularity, many animals have a clear sense of morality, justice, and fair play.[25] Great apes, elephants, wolves, whales, dolphins, hyenas, rats, and mice are capable of a wide range of moral behavior. Many believed that only humans shared food, but bonobos and chimpanzees also enjoy this ritual. Animals are not merely self-interested, unreflective, non-feeling beings locked into a violent and competitive struggle for survival with one another, they have an empathetic and altruistic side. This is evident not in their capacity for grief, in interspecies care and nurturing, but in acts that risk their own lives to save the life of another. The empathetic capacity of animals was vividly demonstrated in one experiment in which hungry rhesus monkeys refused food if doing so meant another monkey would receive an electric shock.[26] Empathetic and altruistic actions suggest that animals should be viewed as moral agents who act with awareness, deliberation, care, and concern toward one another. The “gladiator view of life” was never one propounded by Darwin, who rather emphasized the evolutionary importance of cooperation as much as competition, as did Kropotkin’s important book, Ethics: Origin and Development.[27]
Far from being automatons governed by rigid biological imperatives and crude instincts, ethologists have shown that animals such as chimpanzees, monkeys, and dolphins form genuine cultures, whereby knowledge and behaviors are transmitted by teaching and learning rather than acquired through genetic inheritance.[28] In Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Frans de Waal argues that “the great apes” (chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas) laid the foundation for many human behavioral and familial dynamics. Both he and Jane Goodall conclude that chimpanzee societies demand complex social skills far beyond that allowed by behaviorism. Their world is governed not only by instincts and chemicals, but also through rules and norms. Like us, they live in a culture of shared communication and learning that is passed down from generation to generation. The intelligence of primates is not innate and fixed, but rather, like ours, an important part is socially constructed in the context of culture and technological innovation.[29]
Chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, dolphins, elephants, and other nonhuman species are not just animals, they are political animals, and quite cunning and Machiavellian ones at that, who fight for foods, space, sex, and power and social status.[30] In their political lives, they make conscious decisions and strategic choices, and through sounds, groupings, alliances, and giving or withdrawing of support even make collective votes. Humans did not invent power politics. Much light can be shed on human behavior once we drop the singularity thesis and relate humans to their primate ancestors. Humans did not invent morality and justice, for instance, these social behaviors evolved in an evolutionary context that long preceded human origins. By looking at nature through the distorting lens of speciesism, and in ignorance of contemporary scientific developments, one cannot possibly understand either human or nonhuman animals in any adequate way.
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